


Five Things John Never Saw Coming

by scarlettandblue



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 04:54:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10632633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarlettandblue/pseuds/scarlettandblue
Summary: And the second part of my Head Cannon for mostly every John Sheppard I writeWarnings: Character from cannon.





	

The first thing - Peter Pan.

 

John went away to Summer Camp for the first time when he was seven. He was one of the youngest kids there but he still had a real good time. There was canoeing and horseback riding, rock climbing and even camping out under the stars, eating potatoes they’d roasted in the embers of the campfire and enough smores to have three each.

There were water fights and pillow fights, that John often won because he was small and sneaky. And there was one memorable trip to the local fun fair. John used his tokens up riding the Ferris wheel all day long. That night John went to sleep and dreamed of flying through the air. His hair was still tangled from the wind and there were bright pink cotton candy stains around his mouth and even asleep he was still smiling.

When he returned home at the end of the summer there was just his dad and David. His mom had ‘gone away for a while and they were just going to have to learn to manage without her’.

Of course John knew what it meant. His favourite pony, Bracken had ‘gone away’ after falling and breaking her leg. The vet came with a big van, and they put her inside it, and he never saw her again. Plus the way the cook and the housemaid and the gardener looked at him and whispered about him when they thought he couldn’t hear made it obvious.

He knew he was mad about her being gone. But because he was mostly mad at him mom he figured that made him a really bad person. Because he knew his mom hadn’t just ‘gone away‘. He knew that really she must be in heaven and it was a sin or something to be mad at someone in heaven. So John would just tell himself to shut up about it and squeeze his fists tight enough to make the nails dig half moons into his palms until his eyes watered, and he forgot about being mad.

A week after Summer Camp John started at a new school where he had to board. He should have hated it but he didn’t. He adjusted. That’s what his teachers said on the first report card he took home to his father, ‘John has adjusted well to life at Georgetown.’

 

The second thing - Strange attractors and other agents of chaos.

 

John stopped believing in heaven when he was ten, it made him unpopular at Georgetown. He began to love books and numbers around the same time. By eleven he discovered he could run really fast and shortly after that he began to believe that if only he could run fast enough he might actually be able to fly away. When he was fifteen John had his first kiss, with a boy.

 

John never thought those things were connected. He was simply better at running than anything else. Numbers were cool, so were Russian novels because everyone in them was so far away. He pretty much knew that heaven wasn’t for him, not once he’d kissed that boy, and he still believed that he was made to fly it was just now he understood he needed a plane to do it in.

Flight School and his first few years in the Air Force were the best of his life, and he figured as long as he could have the best thing of all, flying, then nothing else really mattered. He also discovered that while planes were the fastest, strangely it was helicopters that he loved flying best of all. After he‘d flown his Apache in combat he understood, that was what he’d been made for.

John didn’t go home again until after his crash in ‘98. He had a lot of leave time accumulated and the doctors and his CO made him take the extra time off even after he was pronounced fit for duty. So he decided he could spend a few weeks at home. Not that it was home, not anymore. But for the first time in his life he felt like he knew himself enough he could bear going back. He thought it would be different.

He didn’t think he’d still be the disappointing son. The son who was expelled from the most prestigious school in the country. The son who refused to go to Harvard and study law before taking up his rightful place in the family business. The son who was never going to marry and have children because he was afraid he’d be a lousy husband and father. Because the only example he had to follow was a father who would rather a son think his mother dead than admit she ran off with the pool boy.

As soon as he stepped through the door John knew that nothing had changed, but his father was no fool when it came to business. Having a war hero son was good for the company and John discovered that his quiet month getting reacquainted with his father and his brother turned into a series of events staged managed by a PR firm.

He lasted two weeks before he had to escape. He just never imagined he’d be escaping with Nancy.

 

The third thing - His first divorce.

John figured Nancy was probably the one person in the world he might actually stand a chance of being happy with. Even if kissing her was only nice, and even when she explained that their meeting had been a kind of a set up. That his father had approached her when he heard John was coming home, and asked her to pal around with him and keep him out of trouble. Even then he had to agree, she was still pretty much perfect.

So they got a special licence and got married two and a half weeks after they first met. And John‘s CO was so amazed that Captain Sheppard, who was so well know for his incredible awkwardness around the opposite sex that there was a sizable betting pool devoted to the possibility that he might still actually be a virgin, had found a woman, proposed and married her all in the space of two weeks leave that he granted him an further three week furlough. He also gladly submitted the papers he’d been holding on to for a couple of years putting John’s name forward for promotion to Major.

John had been overdue for the new rank, and he certainly deserved it. But there was always going to be a question mark over a man who was thirty one and showed no signs of settling down. A captain could afford to be a bit of a maverick, a bit of a lone wolf; but higher levels of leadership demanded more conformity. The stability of a married man. Don’t ask don’t tell might be the policy but there was no mention of Don’t speculate.

In truth, John had a bad feeling while they were still on honeymoon in Hawaii. But he so desperately wanted to be wrong about it.

He knew that he was never going to be the man Nancy deserved, and the fact she’d never hold it against him only made it worse. He knew there was something missing every time he made love to her, and from her responses she knew it too. But she really did love him and he thought that might be enough.

They stayed together for two years. Through John‘s promotion to Major and a plum posting at the Pentagon, and Nancy‘s quite spectacular rise in the Justice Department. They stayed together long enough to move twice, Washington was just that kind of town and you had to keep moving up the property ladder. But in the end John should have know they were headed for divorce. That they’d reach a point when it needed to turn serious and John would realise he couldn’t do serious, not with Nancy. Probably not with any woman, although that was something that he was never going to acknowledge openly.

So when it happened, when he caught Nancy cuddling one of her friends children, doing that thing women do where they smell the baby’s hair and sigh a little wistfully, John held up his hands, smiled his charming, slightly sheepish little smile and backed right out of there just as fast as he could. Because he loved Nancy enough not to want to screw up her life by waiting until there was a kid before he inevitably fucked up and bailed out. Because it turned out his father wasn‘t the only fucked-up parent he’d learned from.

 

The fourth thing - Mitch the guy who saved his life the second and third times he crashed.

 

Being shot down a second time hurt John. Broken wrist, concussion, several shards of hot metal embedded in his stomach and thigh. His Co-pilot Mitch was okay though, so it was bearable, and John recovered.

That was when he found out about Dex. He was kind of shocked. Because they didn’t seem care, Mitch and Dex. Almost like they were daring the brass to just get it over and fucking ask them already. Which of course they never could, because Dex and Mitch skated close to the edge, but their timing was so perfect they never put a foot over that imaginary line.

John hung out with them a lot after that. He was kind of shocked about that too, that they turned out to be friends, John hadn’t had many of them in his life.

That was how come he ended up flying out solo on that rescue mission. If he’d taken Mitch it might have ended differently, but all he could think of was if Mitch went along it would give the brass the perfect excuse to investigate the guy, and once they started they would find a way to get him and Dex on a one way ticket to a DD.

But being solo, there was only one pair of eyes and John was flying low to keep under the radar, he was busy looking ahead and missed the guy with the rocket launcher who stood up after he’d flown over and targeted him. Fortunately the rocket damaged his control systems but didn’t totally wipe them out. So he had some systems as his bird came down, and John managed to get a mayday out before he put it down in a controlled impact,

And if he had his life to live over he would never have made that call, would have kept his mouth shut and simply taken his chances.

By the time he made it to the original downed chopper darkness had fallen, the leg wound and the broken ribs had slowed him down some.

One of the Special forces guys was still alive, but he was injured bad enough that all John could do was be thankful that the burns were so deep the guy’s nerves were dead, or maybe it was severe shock either way he wasn’t feeling a thing. John held his hand and kept talking and talking until he died. Then all hell broke loose.

John hear the familiar thump of a chopper and felt the hot down-draft as it flew low above him. He started to run, following the sound. But a few minutes later he heard the sickening whine of a rocket passing above him and a gut wrenching thud then the scream of metal shearing as the bird crashed.

The flare of the explosion was over the next rise and John reached the area of the crash in time to see someone trying to crawl from the wrecked, smoking fuselage. As John slid down slope fast the smell of the aviation fuel was heavy and choking and he knew that they probably only had seconds before it ignited. He wrenched the guy free, it was Mitch, he’d known it from the moment he’d crested the rise. And he also knew if it was Mitch it meant Dex was probably somewhere in the wreckage too. He struggled to get Mitch free and clear so he could go back and try to get Dex out as well. But they barely made it ten feet away when the remaining fuel ignited. The force of the explosion threw them clear. John came to first and when he looked back to check the helicopter it was an inferno and no one else was going to make it out of there.

Mitch must have hit his head pretty hard because he was confused, and he got worse and worse. He kept asking where Dex was, and John didn’t have it in him to say Dex was dead, he told Mitch that Dex went ahead. That they’d see him soon.

After a while Mitch stopped asking.

John stumbled across a foot patrol three days later.

He always believed his father pulled some strings to stop the dishonourable discharge he was owed, so he never read the letters they handed him because he figured there wasn’t anything that mattered in them. And he knew the important stuff by heart.

He’d given an account of what happened from his bed in the field hospital. At least the Special Forces guy’s families might get something from that, Dex’s too.

He never understood the letter he received from Mitch’s mother, it caught up with him about three months after his discharge. She thanked him for bring her boy home. John figured there wasn’t much to thank him for in that seeing as he’d missed the mark pretty wide. It was one of the things the shrink they sent to check him out before they decided what to do with him had tried to get him to spill, if he’d been aware that the guy he was rescuing was already dead.

John dreamed of walking through the desert with Mitch. He knew that without him he’d never have made it. Mitch had let him talk, had let him get on with the business of saving them and never once said he doubted John could do it.

 

The Fifth thing -

Who would figure a guy like Rodney was that good in bed.


End file.
